Get ready for Nutanix .NEXT 2025 with theCUBE | Preview with CEO Rajiv Ramaswami

Absolutely, John, look forward to it and nice to see you on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange there.

Yes. We are quite excited actually. So the event is in Washington D.C., as you know, May 7th through ninth. It's our annual NEXT conference and we are actually quite induced by the interest that we are seeing across our customer base, our prospects who are not yet our customers as well as a growing and broadening ecosystem of partners and they're all going to be there. We are excited. The attendance numbers keep going up every day here as we speak and looking forward to seeing everybody there.

And maybe we'll start big picture and work our way down here. So on a big picture basis, look, at the end of the day here, the modern business is all about applications and data and creating value for everybody, customers, employees from the applications and the data. So they become the lifeblood of the enterprise. Now as companies build all these applications and they start using all the data that they have at their disposal, and these applications also generate data, they're now looking to see how they can manage and run all of this. And it's increasingly complex work. You've got your traditional applications, you've got your modern applications that you're building now and you're operating across your data centers, multiple public clouds and locations, and all the time there's a significant shortage of talent and you're looking to invest in new capabilities. How do you bring AI to the enterprise? How do you drive productivity, efficiency on new capabilities? These are all top of mind for our customers and this is really what we and Nutanix are trying to address with the platform that we bring to market.

Yeah, at the end of the day, I think almost every new application that's being built in an organization or an enterprise is going to include AI in it. And whether that's going to be traditional kinds of AI or generative or whether it's going to be now moving forward, looking at agentic options where you're seeing multiple automated entities come together to make things happen in your company or across various things, that is the future. That's really what everybody's trying to do and they're trying to do this to drive efficiencies up, drive productivity up, bring on more capabilities. Now that world, as you said, it is complex. And one of the things that we try and do fundamentally as a company ever since our founding, is to try and make that as simple as possible, make it simple, make it easy, make it automated, and it addresses this massive skills gap that's out there. It also addresses the labor shortage that's out there, and you can do this in a much simpler way. And that's always been our mantra from day one. And we are now doing the same when it comes to AI and enabling AI applications to be deployed in a secure and private way wherever companies would like to deploy them, wherever the data is present, which is everywhere by the way. Some on-prem, some in the edges, some in data, in public clouds. That's what we're doing at Nutanix.

In very, very simple terms we want to be, and we aspire to be the leading platform for organizations and companies around the world to run all their applications and manage their data anywhere. Now, that's a very simple statement, but hides a lot of underlying complexity behind it. And our job is to really support the range of applications that companies have, whether it's legacy virtual machine applications, whether it's these modern cloud-oriented applications that they're building, whether it's these AI-inferencing and agentic applications that are coming on board over the next few years wherever they're running it, with all the data that gets harnessed to make these applications useful. Putting all that together, running them on a simple platform, that's certainly what we are aiming to be doing. And as you said, Nutanix has evolved over time. We started out with this vision of HCI and hyper-converging computer and storage and providing the simplicity of management and automation. We then extended the platform to multiple public clouds, Azure, AWS, and others, including service providers. And now we are on that next cusp of innovation, which is all around making cloud-native applications easy to deploy, making AI applications easy to deploy and run, manage them all in a secure way, provide that capability to enterprises to be cost-effective. And at the same time, by the way, let's talk about what's happening currently. We're also helping companies manage ongoing risk with respect to some of their existing vendors and helping them migrate to a platform that can evolve with them as their future evolves.

Absolutely. In fact, the focus of NEXT is really about that future, about the future of the modern enterprise, the future of the modern organization, how they're going to make use of generative AI and agent AI and bring them together along with cloud-native to build these new applications and modernize how they do business, that's really a focus. Now, as you know, tech is never static. And we've always been about modernizing various paths. First, it was about simply modernizing how you put compute storage together, run your infrastructure in the data center. Then it became how do you extend all of that into the public cloud? And now it's about how do you mix and match the old world and the new world? You're constantly building these new applications. You're constantly trying to use AI while at the same time you have to deal with your keeping the lights on, dealing with enterprise risk, making sure your current mission-critical applications are running just fine. And you want to work with platforms that can enable this entire gap. Run your current applications, do them well, reduce the risk, make sure those are mission-critical, they work well. And at the same time allowing you to innovate and bring on these new things to bear. So the new modernization is about how do you actually tap into cloud native? How do you tap into AI to modernize the entire organization and build these newer applications that drive productivity, drive efficiency across and bring on new capabilities. And we aim to be the underlying platform to make that happen.

Yeah, and I think, look, a lot of different pieces have to come together at the end of the day for an application to run. An agentic application, it may be our new AI application, and there's many different layers in the stack that need to be put together. And in many cases, it's not all going to come from one place, it's going to come from a combination of things. And so if you look at the stack today, yes, you have your hardware of choice in your data center, or you might be using public cloud hardware if you're running in the public cloud. You have a hypervisor layer that provides baseline for how you manage everything, including legacy applications and modern applications. Then you have your Kubernetes stack that allows you to be the platform for orchestrating and running these modern cloud native applications. And on top of that, we have something called Nutanix Enterprise AI, which provides a layer of infrastructure capabilities that allow these AI inferencing applications to be simply run on the platform. And what's in that layer keeps changing as AI keeps evolving rapidly. In the early days, it's very simple. When we first came out with that, it was just effectively being able to download a model of your choice, tie it into the GPUs and create an open AI compatible API that developers could use. Now, there's a lot more capabilities included in there. The ability to fine tune, the ability to re-rank, the ability to route data lengths and load balance across multiple GPUs. There's so many new capabilities being introduced in that layer of the stack every day. And there's multiple versions of these stacks. NVIDIA has a stack that we partner very closely with them on to make that available. There's open source versions that are also out there that we make available. So now you put this stack together and then along with all of that, you need all the data management capabilities to be put together. And then you bring that all together into a stack that can now be used almost in a turnkey fashion by an enterprise, because that's what they need. They don't want to be sitting there putting all of these building blocks together because then that's what they're spending their time on. They should be spending that time on what's the new application that is specific to my business that I need to go build and run that's going to enable me to be productive? The rest of it they should take for granted. And that's really what we try and do.

No, I 100% agree with you, John. And that's really the founding mission of our company, to try to make these complex enterprise software pieces come together. Make things simple by, I mean, one thing that we do very well is hide all the underlying complexity and what we bring to the table and the market so that as a user, as for somebody to use us, it's really, really simple. Whether it's operating in an infrastructure layer or an application layer. And at the same time, by the way, one of the things I think for a lot of our audience is also making sure that they remain relevant to their organization's futures. So if you're a virtual machine admin today, you want to develop the skills necessary to become a platform engineer, because you're going to be a Kubernetes platform engineer and that's what it's going to take for you to stand up these new modern environments so that developers at your company can run and build these modern AI applications. So it's equally important. And part of our conference is also about helping our audience acquire these skill sets, get training, be exposed to these new technologies and figure out how they can grow their skills from a career perspective.

Yeah, in fact, our ecosystem is continuing to grow every day here. And in some ways, by the way, for us to be the platform for enterprises, the platform is equally defined by the breadth of the ecosystem. And our ecosystem continues to grow and we've actually still to have many of our ecosystem partners sponsor this event co-sponsor it with us and be there in person. And that number continues to grow every year. Now, if you look at the different components of that ecosystem, we've always had a traditional hardware partners. So when it comes to several manufacturers and several vendors, we've had now partnerships with almost all of them for many years with some of the more recent ones being rekindling of our partnership with Dell and of course building of a new partnership with Cisco among others at that layer. We've also started partnering with storage providers, which we never used to do in the past, but that's driven by the new reality now that we have a cloud platform that's broader than just HCI, that needs to work with a much broader ecosystem of what's out there. So we have a, now our platform now supports Dell's PowerFlex storage system, and that's becoming generally available soon, and you're going to hear more about that at the conference. We are also working to expand that storage ecosystem of partners. Then we have our cloud partners that we've been working with, Microsoft, AWS. These have been partners for a while, and that's another important layer in terms of extending and providing ultimately the capabilities that customers want to be able to run their apps anywhere. Now there's a whole host of newer partners around AI. So our partnership with NVIDIA continues to deepen. Last year we were working with them on their inferencing. NVIDIA NIM and then NVIDIA AI for enterprises. And now as they start developing new capabilities, those are all things that we incorporated in our platform. There's also growing a set of ecosystem partners around AI, smaller companies, the independent software vendors, companies like DataRobot that we work with, Hugging Face, very important in terms of the repository of models that they carry. And our ability to connect with them, automatically download those models, them providing service capabilities to our enterprise customers, which many people need because that's really what it takes for them to run these AI applications. So that ecosystem is a new ecosystem for us that we have been working hard to continue to grow. And you'll see more of that as well at the show this year.

At a broad level, by the way, it's going to be about the things that we already discussed, which is how do you plan your... How can we help in terms of the organization evolution for the next five, 10 years? How can customers work with us to build these modern applications, cloud-native applications? How can they use generative AI effectively in the enterprise? Those are going to be big themes. At the same time, while how can they reduce their enterprise risk today with some of the other current vendors out there and figure out a path forward that they can actually run their business safely and effectively on a platform like ours? Those are going to be the fundamental themes. Now, you should expect at NEXT, we are going to have a bunch of exciting tech announcements from a product perspective and also ecosystem partner announcements. Those are what I look forward to. I'm not going to tell you what they are at this point. Please come to the show and join us at the show, and I look forward to seeing you there. And the other important component is also hearing from customers. So you hear from a number of customers about their experiences. How are they dealing with some of these issues that we talk about? How are they dealing with their migrations? How are they dealing with modern applications and what are they doing in AI? So you're going to hear from that community, very important community of customers who tell our story better than we can also tell in many cases. So you're going to hear from that. And then the last part is there's going to be a lot of education-oriented things at getting our practitioners out there to be trained and equipped for this next generation that's coming at them.

Look, a very topical thing for a lot of customers is how do they reduce their risk with their incumbent vendor? Broadcom now with having purchased VMware, that's very much top of mind for a lot of customers, of course. But then for a lot of them, that's just one. It's a tactical issue. What they're now thinking through as they go through this is what is their platform of the future? What is their end state from an architectural perspective? What do they want to do with their applications? Where do they want to run them? What's the platform they want to run then? What's going to take them into the future? And so these decisions get intertwined. And really, I think it's not just about migration from one vendor to another vendor, but it's about really what is this future about and who can they best partner with to take them into the future? And we are excited to be considered as part of that solution. And we've always been about making sure our customers are successful. We are proud about the fact that that's our number one concept principle inside the company, obsessed about our customer success. And we've been doing that ever since we were founded. And our net promoter score, which is what our customers rate us, has been 90 plus for the last 10 years.

And we intend to keep it that way. We look forward to sharing all of this with our customers and partners.

Thank you very much, John. - Okay.